We all seek to be happy and to find peace. Yet, many of us struggle to sustain a state of peace and happiness for much long. We are often taken up by factors present in the world around us. We often trust that our peace and happiness will come from the money we make, our social standing, the things we possess and our reputation (((to name just a few). We attempt to search for peace and happiness in external things which like a toy that, following our initial excitement and joy, joins the rest of the pile of old toys because we have outgrown it or have set our minds on something else.
The fact is that we cannot find any long lasting peace and happiness in external things. You must have heard this before but the way we live appears to suggest we don’t believe it. Instead, we believe that having more, achieving fame and fortune, acquiring goods and possessions, etc will bring about a life of peace and happiness. Sadly, I am not immune from this delusion myself. Many were the things I thought would improve my life and make me happy. Many were the things I believed would be solutions. But, when I think about it, these external objects were not the solutions to my problems. They only served to quench my desire for a short time, leaving behind them broken hopes and aspirations.
I believe that the main reason we fill our lives with what is external to us is because we feel empty inside. As a result, we fuel our desire for peace and happiness by wrongly attaching ourselves to objects we think we have power over or which we think we can control. But ironically, it is these objects through our attachment to them that end up conditioning our lives. They don’t control our lives but it is we who choose to let them rule over our lives. In this way, we give them an existence that they do not have in their own right. In believing that they can give us happiness or peace, we provide them with qualities they do not possess. Once we truly appreciate the implication of this realisation of the emptiness of things, the more we can understand how searching for happiness outside of ourselves is but a pointless and trivial pursuit.
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